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Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Gold (now in theaters)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

GOLD – no relation
to the Roger Moore adventure vehicle of the same title from 1974, or even the
borderline-science-fiction German epic of 1934 (whose climax of titanic
explosions got re-used as stock footage by numerous Hollywood B-movies) - made its
premiere late in 2016, apparently with the faint hope the Bob/Harv Weinstein
production would be deemed Oscar worthy.

But it earned no
nominations for that kind of gold whatsoever (funny, the Roger Moore GOLD did
get an Oscar nod for the Elmer Bernstein/Don Black music; check out the
forgotten score online), and the feature directed by Stephen Gaghan, rather
quietly made its way into most theaters in early 2017.

I caught it on a
pure whim and was rather surprised how much I liked it. Even with a Matthew
McConaughey star-turn heavy on the scenery-chewing, it still felt like a picture
actually made for grownups, a little bit more than most. Then again, so would
the Roger Moore or the German one, in these lamentable times.

The plot is said
to “inspired by true events” – yeah, that old carny come-on – one is surprised
that ROGUE ONE didn’t make the same boast - but I do believe GOLD derives from
an actual case that involved a Canadian company. McConaughey, laying on the
McConaugheyisms really thick to match a paunchy waistline, plays Kenny Wells, hucksterish businessman
carrying on his father’s Reno-based mineral-prospecting company, that has never
made it out of the boiler-room leagues. In fact, by the 1980s the
company is almost nonexistent, running principally out of a Nevada bar and the
home of Wells’ long-suffering waitress-lover (a marginalized Bryce Dallas Howard).

On a longshot,
Wells gambles his last remaining liquid assets and investor money behind
Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), a maverick geologist with an idea that he can
locate a vast gold deposit in Indonesia via plate-tectonics theories (the
science is given pretty short shrift in the script, I noticed; never know when
school boards will ban continental drift as heretical – Ohio will be among the
first, I think).

The two go to an
obscure jungle valley in Indonesia and to prospect fruitlessly, until, at the last
minute, Acosta comes up with a rich rock-core sample that promises not just a
lucrative gold strike but one of the biggest of all time.

Suddenly all the Wall
Street fat cats and financiers who ignored Kenny Wells come courting him – and then
trying to prey on the seemingly unsophisticated and uncouth Wells, a cowboy-type entrepreneur,
who still does contracts by handshakes and writing on napkins. The script
becomes something in the genre of WOLF OF WALL STREET and THE BIG SHORT in
depicting the corrosive effects of greed and ego on a flamboyant, flawed hero.

Midway through,
we realize that what started out as the lead character’s folksy narration is
actually recorded testimony, and something really bad must have gone down
in Wells’ volcanic rise. It’s so obvious, in fact, that with all the chicanery and
manipulation going on by business crooks on all sides that you just might
actually be caught by surprise.

There’s kind of a
nice balance in McConaughey’s extravagant mannerisms and Ramirez’ low-key
partner role, but perhaps what really makes GOLD interesting (or, conceivably,
for some viewers, uninteresting) is the de-mystification of the modern wildcat gold-prospecting
business. Gold hunting is the background/ancillary detail in countless western
shoot-em-ups and crime programmers, but who knows how gold speculation actually
works in a business sense? Stephen Gaghan’s feature, gilded as it may be with
Hollywood iron pyrite, shows us a little of that, yet still pleads for the
allure of the rare mineral and the lengths people will go to be associated with
it.

And the script
mentions “Suharto” and shows a photo of Gerald Ford and assumes the viewer has
enough brains to know what’s being discussed. As I said, a drama that takes as a given that there are grownups in the audience. Which sometimes feels as rare as gold. (3
out of 4 stars)